________________________________________________
_ The other day (confided Reginald), when I was killing time in
the bathroom and making bad resolutions for the New Year, it
occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief
qualification, I understand, is that you must be born. Well,
I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all
right on that score, and then I got to work on a Hymn to the
New Year, which struck me as having possibilities. It
suggested extremely unusual things to absolutely unlikely
people, which I believe is the art of first-class catering in
any department. Quite the best verse in it went something
like this -
"Have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,
Or the snarl of a snaffled snail
(Husband or mother, like me, or spouse),
Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house
Where the wounded wombats wail?"
It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that's
where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of
their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me
narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at
the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it.
It simply wasn't nice. But the editors were unanimous in
leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before
and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was
extremely limited.
It was just on the top of that discouragement that the
Duchess wanted me to write something in her album--something
Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent--and I
thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the
requirements of the case. So I started in with -
"Cackle, cackle, little hen,
How I wonder if and when
Once you laid the egg that I
Met, alas! too late. Amen."
The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air
of forgiveness and chose jugee to the whole thing; also she
said it wasn't Persian enough, as though I were trying to
sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather
than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the new version
read -
"The hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows
In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;
To some election turn thy waning span
And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes."
I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to
satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely
pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort
of St. Luke's summer of commercial usefulness. But the
Duchess begged me to leave out any political allusions; she's
the president of a Women's Something or other, and she said
it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable, methods.
I never can remember which Party Irene discourages with her
support, but I shan't forget an occasion when I was staying
at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at the house
of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things for a woman
who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent
medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to
the former and the political literature to the sick woman,
and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about it
afterwards. It seems the leaflet was addressed "To those
about to wobble"--I wasn't responsible for the silly title of
the thing--and the woman never recovered; anyway, the voter
was completely won over by the grapes and jellies, and I
think that should have balanced matters. The Duchess called
it bribery, and said it might have compromised the candidate
she was supporting; he was expected to subscribe to church
funds and chapel funds, and football and cricket clubs and
regattas, and bazaars and beanfeasts and bellringers, and
poultry shows and ploughing matches, and reading-rooms and
choir outings, and shooting trophies and testimonials, and
anything of that sort; but bribery would not have been
tolerated.
I fancy I have perhaps more talent for electioneering than
for poetry, and I was really getting extended over this
quatrain business. The egg began to be unmanageable, and the
Duchess suggested something with a French literary ring about
it. I hunted back in my mind for the most familiar French
classic that I could take liberties with, and after a little
exercise of memory I turned out the following:-
"Hast thou the pen that once the gardener had?
I have it not; and know, these pears are had.
Oh, larger than the horses of the Prince
Are those the general drives in Kaikobad."
Even that didn't altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the
geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad
was an unfashionable German spa, where you'd meet matrimonial
bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was
beginning to slip its moorings by that time I look rather
nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would say I lose it
very often. I mustn't monopolise the conversation.)
"Of course, if you want something really Persian and
passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it," I went on to
suggest; but she grabbed the book away from me.
"Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it.
Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to
the quick" -
I said I didn't believe Agatha had a quick, and we got quite
heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess declared
I shouldn't write anything nasty in her book, and I said I
wouldn't write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn't a
very wide point of difference between us. For the rest of
the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was really
working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier that's
buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed. When I got
an opportunity I hunted up Agatha's autograph, which had the
front page all to itself, and, copying her prim handwriting
as well as I could, I inserted above it the following
Thibetan fragment:-
"With Thee, oh, my Beloved, to do a dak
(a dak I believe is a sort of uncomfortable post-journey)
On the pack-saddle of a grunting yak,
With never room for chilling chaperone,
'Twere better than a Panhard in the Park."
That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover
even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable.
I very much doubt if she'd do it with her own husband in the
privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I've remarked
before, should always stimulate the imagination.
By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you
on the 14th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I'm
not. I'm dining with you. _
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